JORGE EDWARDS
245
There was a curious contrast between these men with their
chrome-trimmed cars-forerunners of a society of test tubes and
electronic products-and some of the people from the past, such as ex–
ambassadors, ex-ministers, ex-parliament members, who had not
known how
to
adapt themselves to the new realities. Some had held on
to their old mansions, while last year's wardrobe still allowed them to
walk downtown streets dressed in conservative, dark blue, double–
breasted suits and shiny shoes; but their pensions, eaten away by
inflation, allowed them to eat nothing but
pancutas,
the saddest of
native stews, made from lumps of dough cooked in water.
In
this
regard, I asked an old parliamentarian from what might be called the
center Left: "Why don 't you sell your house? You could live very well
in a small apartment." He lowered his voice: "Because it's swank," he
said, "and you 've got to keep up appearances." I'd always thought of
"swank" -an expression that partly equates with vulgarity, partly
with social climbing in stratified, hierarchical societies-as a category
that had been eclipsed years ago. But many social phenomena that
seemed extinct have been resurrected in Chile, or, better said, have
shown that they had always been there, crouched behind the stage sets
constructed first by the ' Revolution and later by the Counter–
revolution. And yet, restoring the old order was merely a caricature of
the past, a disturbing parody.
At even two or three kilometers from the coast, you can smell the
sharp tang of the Pacific, christened by its discoverer, Magellan, on one
of its rare calm days. Near Isla Negra the mighty waves crash one after
another close to the shore in great charges of foam, striking against the
rocks, leaping high and disintegrating tnto the air. All the wintry
coast, the pine groves, red earth, and sand seem to be dominated by the
splashing, by the explosion of the waves, and the piercing odor of the
sea. Pablo Neruda's house on Isla Negra survives entirely shut up, in
mourning, with a ghostly presence. I had been the poet's neighbor for
many years and I can see myself hoisting the flag indicating that he was
in residence, talking on the stone bench near the ship's figurehead and
the mossy, half-buried anchor, drinking from huge goblets at the bar
where a mobile of moving eyes hung from the ceiling, each of whose
beams had been carved with the name of one of his
desaparecido
friends: Garcia Lorca, Raton Agudo, Rojas Jimenez, Ruben Azocar,
Paul Eluard.... At the inn, Senora Elena, the same as ever, kept her
post under a framed article in which Pablo had bid farewell to her dead
husband: "Black Handkerchiefs for Don Jaime." According to what
Pablo wrote, Don Jaime had made a career of service to Arturo
Allessandri Palma, two-time president of the republic and founder of a
